Downtown vacancy rate not so bad

Last week the Bee ran an interesting graphic showing office vacancies around the city. One would expect that with all the doom-and-gloom surrounding downtown, that the vacancies there would be much higher than elsewhere.

Surprisingly, that is not the case.

For the entire city:

The vacancy rate at the end of the year was 13.01% compared
to 13.03% at the end of 2011, the report said. That means about 2.7
million square feet of office space out of the 25 million square feet of
office space in the market, which includes government-owned offices, is
empty.

Downtown, the vacancy was 11.66% – or below the city average. East Shaw had the absolute worse vacancy rate, at 20.48%, with West Shaw not far behind.

It’s relevant to note that while the city wants to destroy the Fulton Mall to “bring back business”, the very auto-focused Shaw has the highest vacancies in the area, well above the pedestrian oriented downtown. It’s no surprise that Clovis got a grant to attempt to revitalize their portion of Shaw, and that the feedback given was to make the area friendlier to non-automobile users.

It’s no surprise that the northeast has the lowest vacancy rate at 7.93%, thanks to all the shiny and new buildings. That being said, that’s not a low number, which makes surprising the development of a new ten story building in that section of town, which is actually near Woodward park. That area is given a vacancy rate of 11.54% (almost equal to downtown), but it’s unclear where the lines are drawn separating the districts.